Saturday, January 8, 2011

Urban Decay pigments

So, recently, I was able to find these on sale on Hautelook and I could not pass them up for the price. I have never tried Urban Decay's pigments before. I've tried a couple shadows and of course, their PRIMER POTION (Heaven sent). I've heard wonderful things and read great reviews about most of UD's products...so when given the chance to get them cheaply, I had to buy as many as I could.

So, first, let's swatch these beauties...

from top left to right: GUNMETAL, YEYO, SMOG

2nd row: SHAG, ROCKSTAR, GODDESS

3rd row: GRAFFITI, ASPHYXIA, PROTEST

I have to say, a couple of these are very nice. The pink color, Asphyxia, is smooth, highly pigmented and is a soft pink that can easily be used in many looks w/out going "over the top". It's shimmery and like satin.

The green color, Graffiti, is also a wonderful color. It has a slight hint of gold to it, but still manages to remain a "cool" color. I have a hard time wearing warm colors, but greens like this are great to work with.

The color (next to the green) called Shag is what I would call a melon-gold color. Not orange, not gold, but it has a slight peach tone to it, which I LOVE. Highly pigmented, easy to blend. Yeyo, the white pigment, is the perfect inner corner highlight color. Vibrant, smooth, easy to work with/blendable. Stands out as a highlight. Each color has qualities worthwhile. I will try all of them in looks and hope to get lots of use out of them.

That all being said... the packaging for these is the worst I've came upon ever. It says that these are 1 gram. I'm not really sure how that looks in a jar, as far as the amount, but I'm guessing it's not much. Not a problem, usually, b/c you only need a TINY bit to go a long way. HOWEVER, being that the packaging is so bad, you end up dropping a lot of the product... the brush that is attached to the lid is useless and causes more problems with fallout. You can NOT use it to apply the pigment unless you want to cover your whole face with the pigment fallout. Not the easiest thing to get off if you completed the rest of your makeup first (foundation, etc). So, if there was a way to extract this from the container it comes in (I'm working on it), it'd be worth it to use these. If not, it's quite hard to not spill and you can not fit most brushes into the tube if you tried that route. It's just not going to happen.

So, for quality, color and blendability, this is decent enough for the price I paid. I'd never pay full price, which was originally about $17. I believe most places have them for approximately $5. As far as packaging, this alone makes it hard for me to want to repurchase these pigments in the future.

I'd give this product a 5 on a scale of 1-10, and that deduction of 5 points is mostly due to the poorly designed tubes and useless brush it comes with.

UPDATE: I was able to get out what appears to be most of the pigment from each container. I just put them into sample jars. There is a lot more than 1 gram in each container. So, Urban Decay advertises 1 gram, but if you shake and pound the container on a table (on top of a piece of paper) then funnel it into another container, it does measure out to about 3-5 grams!!!!! So, quite the difference in size! I'm actually a lot more pleased that I bought these now.

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About the Artist

I am a makeup fanatic, along w/ holding a true passion for all forms of art... I'm a singer, a photographer and I do consider myself a makeup artist. All makeup is art we place on our face every day to express who we are. Whether we are a minimalist or we like to go over the top, how we chose to present ourselves is a look at our personality and how we feel.

The Soul Needs Beauty For A Soul Mate... When The Soul Wants, The Soul Waits...

How fitting that I should use a U2 quote to introduce you to what I'm doing here.

I want to share my knowledge with you, my dear rock stars. Basically, this blog, this little corner of the web-world, will be where I write about BEAUTY and all things that pertain to it; goods, makeup, tutorials, and basic info that I think you'd find helpful.